Barcelona no es un parque temático

La verdad es que el problema del Airbnb es especialmente grave.

The Airbnb problem is particularly severe.

Desde que aparecieron los pisos turísticos, el alquiler residencial en Barcelona ha subido casi un cuarenta por ciento en diez años.

Since tourist apartments took off, residential rents in Barcelona have risen nearly forty percent in ten years.

Los vecinos no pueden pagar.

Residents can't afford to stay.

Se van a los suburbios.

They move to the suburbs.

Y los pisos vacíos se llenan de turistas.

And the empty apartments fill up with tourists.

Here's what gets me about the Airbnb argument, though.

Every city with a housing crisis blames Airbnb, and in some cases they're right.

But Barcelona also has planning restrictions that make it hard to build new housing.

So is it Airbnb, or is it a city that hasn't built enough homes for decades?

No, no, espera.

It's an important factor, but you're right that it's not the only one.

Es un factor importante, pero tienes razón en que no es el único.

However, the difference with other cities is the scale.

Sin embargo, la diferencia con otras ciudades es la escala.

Barcelona is estimated to have more than sixteen thousand illegal tourist apartments, on top of the legal ones.

En Barcelona, se calcula que hay más de dieciséis mil apartamentos turísticos ilegales, además de los legales.

The market has been distorted in a way that goes beyond just a lack of new construction.

El mercado se ha distorsionado de una manera que va más allá de la falta de construcción.

Sixteen thousand illegal apartments.

That's a city within a city.

And the thing is, who benefits?

Not the old fishing families in Barceloneta.

It's landlords and property investors who realized they could make ten times more renting to tourists than to locals.

Bueno, eso es el corazón del problema.

That's the heart of it.

El turismo genera mucho dinero, pero ese dinero no se distribuye de manera igual.

Tourism generates enormous wealth, but that wealth isn't distributed equally.

Los grandes hoteles, las cadenas de restaurantes, las plataformas digitales: ellos se llevan la mayor parte.

The big hotels, restaurant chains, digital platforms take most of it.

Y los vecinos pagan los costes: el ruido, la suciedad, la pérdida de su barrio.

Meanwhile residents pay the costs: the noise, the mess, the slow disappearance of their own neighborhood.

So it's a class story as much as it's a tourism story.

The people who benefit from mass tourism are mostly not the people who have to live with it.

Completamente.

Completely.

Y aquí hay una ironía histórica que me parece fascinante.

And there's a historical irony here worth noting.

Durante el franquismo, el gobierno promovió el turismo masivo en la costa española como una estrategia política deliberada.

During Franco's dictatorship, the regime actively promoted mass tourism along the Spanish coast as a deliberate political strategy.

Franco necesitaba divisas extranjeras y también quería que el mundo viera una España moderna y estable.

Franco needed foreign currency and wanted the world to see a modern, stable Spain.

Right, 'Spain is different,' that whole campaign.

I've written about this.

The paradox is that Franco used tourism to legitimize a dictatorship internationally, and meanwhile the people who lived in those beach towns had almost no say in what was being built around them.

Exacto.

Exactly.

Y lo que me resulta interesante es que la lógica no ha cambiado tanto.

And what strikes me is that the underlying logic hasn't changed that much.

Entonces era el Estado quien decidía que el turismo era más importante que las comunidades locales.

Back then, it was the State that decided tourism mattered more than local communities.

Ahora son el mercado y las plataformas digitales quienes toman esa misma decisión.

Now it's the market and digital platforms making that same decision.

El resultado es parecido.

The outcome is similar.

That's a genuinely sharp observation.

The mechanism changed but the power dynamic didn't.

The locals are still the ones who absorb the cost.

I want to pull on one more thread here, though, because Barcelona is not just any Spanish city.

It's the capital of Catalonia.

Does the tourism question intersect with the independence question?

A ver, es una pregunta importante.

It's an important question.

Hay una parte del movimiento independentista que ve el turismo masivo como otra forma de colonización económica, controlada desde Madrid o desde multinacionales extranjeras.

Part of the independence movement frames mass tourism as another form of economic colonization, controlled from Madrid or by foreign multinationals.

No es la posición mayoritaria, pero existe.

It's not the majority position, but it exists.

I've heard that argument.

And I find it interesting but a little convenient, because plenty of the people profiting from tourist apartments in Barcelona are Catalan, not Spanish or foreign.

Grievance sometimes gets applied selectively.

La verdad es que sí, tienes razón en eso.

Fair point, you're right about that.

El independentismo y el problema del turismo son dos cosas distintas aunque a veces se mezclan en el discurso político.

The independence question and the tourism problem are separate issues, even if they sometimes get mixed in political discourse.

Lo que sí es verdad es que el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona tiene poderes limitados para controlar algo que es, en parte, un fenómeno global.

What is true is that Barcelona's city government has limited powers to control what is, in part, a global phenomenon.

Which brings us to policy, which is where this gets interesting and genuinely difficult.

Because every city that faces this problem has to answer the same question: do you try to limit who comes, or do you try to change the conditions that make mass tourism so destructive?

Mira, el alcalde actual, Jaume Collboni, ha tomado una decisión bastante radical: anunció en 2024 que la ciudad no va a renovar las licencias de los apartamentos turísticos cuando venzan en 2028.

The current mayor, Jaume Collboni, made a fairly radical decision: he announced in 2024 that the city will not renew tourist apartment licenses when they expire in 2028.

Son más de diez mil apartamentos.

That's more than ten thousand apartments.

Es una medida sin precedentes en Europa.

It's an unprecedented measure in Europe.

I covered that announcement and the reaction was fascinating.

The property industry called it expropriation.

Housing activists said it didn't go far enough.

And the tourist industry said it would damage Barcelona's competitiveness.

Everyone was angry, which sometimes means you've found the right policy.

Es que el problema es que estas medidas llegan muy tarde.

The problem is that these measures are coming very late.

Y mientras tanto, los vecinos que se fueron ya no van a volver.

And the residents who already left aren't coming back.

Un barrio que pierde su comunidad no se recupera de la noche a la mañana, aunque elimines todos los apartamentos turísticos mañana mismo.

A neighborhood that loses its community doesn't recover overnight, even if you eliminate every tourist apartment tomorrow.

The Amsterdam model gets cited a lot in these conversations.

They banned new tourist apartments in the historic center, raised the tourist tax, limited cruise ships.

And it's made some difference.

But Amsterdam is also still absolutely packed in summer.

The lesson might be that no single policy is enough.

Bueno, y hay otra dimensión que no hemos mencionado: el turismo de cruceros.

And there's another dimension we haven't mentioned: cruise ship tourism.

Barcelona es el puerto de cruceros más grande de Europa.

Barcelona is Europe's largest cruise port.

Cada barco puede traer cinco mil personas que pasan ocho horas en la ciudad, no duermen en hoteles locales, no comen en restaurantes de barrio, pero sí saturan las calles y los monumentos.

Each ship can bring five thousand people who spend eight hours in the city, don't sleep in local hotels, don't eat in neighborhood restaurants, but do saturate the streets and monuments.

The cruise ship problem is almost its own category.

You're getting the maximum impact on public space with the minimum economic benefit to the city.

A cruise passenger might spend forty euros in Barcelona.

A regular tourist spending a week might spend a thousand.

The ratio of disruption to revenue is completely inverted.

Exacto.

And yet there are very powerful economic interests in keeping cruise traffic high.

Y aun así, hay intereses económicos muy fuertes en mantener el tráfico de cruceros.

The port employs a lot of people.

El puerto da trabajo a mucha gente.

This is the trap of mass tourism: once an economy depends on it, regulating it becomes very hard without hurting the workers who sustain it.

Esta es la trampa del turismo masivo: cuando una economía depende de él, es muy difícil regularlo sin causar daño a los trabajadores que lo sostienen.

So you have a city that can't easily say no to tourism because the economic dependency is too deep, but also can't say yes unconditionally because the social cost is destroying the thing people come to see.

It's almost a self-defeating loop.

A ver, hay una frase que resume bien el dilema.

A Catalan urban planner put it well a few years ago: 'Barcelona is being loved to death.' Tourists come because the city is special, authentic, full of life.

Un urbanista catalán dijo hace unos años: 'Barcelona está siendo amada hasta la muerte.' Los turistas vienen porque la ciudad es especial, auténtica, llena de vida.

But the more who come, the less special, authentic, and full of life it becomes.

Pero cuantos más vienen, menos especial, auténtica y llena de vida es.

Loved to death.

That's a phrase that stays with you.

And it applies beyond Barcelona, obviously.

Venice.

Dubrovnik.

Kyoto.

There's a whole category of places that are suffering from being too beautiful, too interesting, too well-photographed.

Y la pregunta más profunda, la que me parece más difícil de responder, es esta: ¿para quién existe una ciudad?

And the deepest question, the hardest one to answer, is this: who does a city exist for?

¿Para los que viven en ella, o también para los millones que quieren visitarla?

For the people who live in it, or also for the millions who want to visit?

Porque si dices que solo para los residentes, entonces el turismo tiene que limitarse radicalmente.

Because if you say only for residents, tourism must be radically limited.

Pero si dices que también para los visitantes, ¿dónde está el límite?

But if you say also for visitors, where exactly is the limit?

I've been thinking about this and I don't think there's a clean answer.

But I lean toward the view that cities primarily exist for the people who live in them, and visitors are guests.

Not unwelcome guests, but guests.

And a city that forgets that starts to hollow itself out.

Mira, estoy de acuerdo.

Agreed.

Y creo que lo que más me preocupa no es el número de turistas en sí, sino la actitud que produce el turismo masivo: la idea de que una ciudad es un producto de consumo, que existe para ser disfrutada y fotografiada, no para ser vivida.

And what worries me most isn't the number of tourists per se, it's the attitude that mass tourism produces: the idea that a city is a consumer product, existing to be enjoyed and photographed rather than lived in.

Eso cambia la relación entre el visitante y el lugar.

That fundamentally changes the relationship between visitor and place.

The Instagram problem.

When a place becomes primarily a backdrop for content, it stops being a place and starts being a set.

And the people who actually live there become, at best, extras in someone else's story.

Es que eso es muy bien dicho.

That's very well put.

Y creo que los barceloneses con las pistolas de agua estaban diciendo exactamente eso: 'No somos una atracción.

And I think the Barcelonans with the water guns were saying exactly that: 'We are not an attraction.

Somos personas.

We are people.

Este es nuestro barrio.' No era un rechazo al turista como persona, era un rechazo a ese modelo de ciudad.

This is our neighborhood.' It wasn't a rejection of tourists as individuals.

Which, if you think about it, is also a message to the tourism industry and to city governments everywhere.

The social contract has limits.

And when those limits get pushed far enough, people pick up water guns.

Or worse.

La verdad es que me parece importante terminar con esto: el problema no tiene una solución perfecta.

It's worth ending on this: the problem has no perfect solution.

Pero hay ciudades que están intentando gestionarlo mejor: con tasas turísticas más altas, con límites al número de cruceros, con protección del alquiler residencial.

But some cities are managing it better, with higher tourist taxes, limits on cruise ships, protection for residential renting.

No es imposible.

It's not impossible.

Requiere voluntad política y una definición clara de qué valores son prioritarios.

It requires political will and a clear definition of what the city actually values.

Values.

That's the word.

This isn't fundamentally an economics problem or a zoning problem.

It's a question about what you think a city is for, and whether you have the courage to say it out loud and make decisions that follow from it.

Barcelona is trying to figure that out in real time, and the rest of the world is watching.